Children and pornography: Every 14-year-old boy has seen porn, says school study

Fears: Parents and teachers should be worried about how many children are accessing pornography, the research suggests (Picture: Alamy)

Every 14-year-old boy and half the girls in the same year at a school have seen pornography, new research shows.

The scale of access to pornography among children should trigger ‘moral panic’ among parents, schools and the government about how to tackle the problem, deputy children’s commissioner Sue Berelowitz warned after seeing the research.

‘We came across one study where they were looking at the whole cohort of year nine pupils within a large local authority in England,’ she said.

‘The findings were that 100 per cent – that is every single year nine boy – 14-year-olds – is accessing pornography. And about 50 per cent of the girls. The girls did not want to look at the porn – they were being made to by the boys.’

She added: ‘Children as young as 11 were actively ‘seeking out pornography.’

Some boys ‘now felt they had an ‘absolute entitlement to have sex with girls, any time, any place, any where, with whomsoever they wished’, it was claimed.

Ms Berelowitz added: ‘We have commissioned research into young people’s understanding of consent… It raises very serious questions about whether boys in particular have any understanding of the concept of consent.

‘No one should be panicking – but why should not there be a moral panic?

‘Because what we are uncovering is that the scale of what this is doing to children and young people’s sense of what is reasonable.

‘If that does not generate some huge moral anxiety amongst us as a responsible population, government and communuity then quite frankly I would be very worried.’

Ms Berelowitz was talking to BBC Radio Four’s Bringing Up Britain programme about unpublished research.

MP Claire Perry, an adviser on pornography to prime minister David Cameron, told the programme that parents had to tackle the issue.

She claimed: ‘It is a bit like when your children get nits – you have to tell the parents with whom the child had seen the pornography.

‘One of the worst things is that parents are so shocked and ashamed that they find it difficult to talk to their children, let alone the other parents.

‘Parents should contact others, saying “my child has seen porn, he may have sent it round his classmates, please can we all get together and talk about it?”

‘We are very scared to do that as parents we shouldn’t be – it is a public health problem, I think in a way.’

She also demanded ‘better filtering’ of sites by internet service providers and urged parents to control what their children view online.

‘This sense that we have ceded the digital space to our children is really interesting because if your children said “actually mum I want to go and drive the car” or “I would just like to eat crisps and chocolate for every meal”, we would feel we had some level of responsibility or some ability to control those decisions,’ she said.

‘And somehow it has been made very difficult for us to feel we have the same ability to intervene in the online space.’